Mehreen Faruqi (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Greens will be supporting Senator Pocock's amendments to change the time of indexation, to start off with. We have to be clear that student debt, firstly, cannot be fixed, because student debt really shouldn't exist. Similarly, indexation cannot be fixed, because indexation shouldn't exist either. Nevertheless, there are ways in which the current system can be made fairer, and Senator David Pocock's amendments do try to make the system fairer. It makes no sense to charge indexation on a debt that has already been paid off. All repayments should be taken into account before a debt is subject to indexation. This amendment represents a change that can make some difference to the burden of student debt, and I really urge the government to support this amendment.

Similarly, the Greens support the undoing of the punitive fee hikes and funding cuts that the coalition brought in under the rightly much-maligned Job-ready Graduates scheme. These fee hikes were brought in by the Morrison government as part of this disastrous job-ready program. The Universities Accord has unequivocally called this program a failure and has called for its immediate remediation.

Labor should have undone and reversed these fee hikes that have now led to $50,000 arts degrees and are, again, piling more and more debt onto students and are actually making people rethink whether they should go to university or not. Labor should have done it immediately, as soon as they got into government, but they have waited for 2½ years, and they're still not doing it, so we need to support this amendment today.

I've said it before and I'll say again: this bill is such a missed opportunity when it comes to this urgently needed reversal of the Job-ready Graduates fee hikes, which really have drastically shifted the cost of delivering university education away from government, whose responsibility it is, and onto students. This amendment does represent a small step in the right direction, and the Greens will support it.